Robert Morgan quotes

Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity. (Robert Morgan)
If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable. View quote
Robert Morgan
We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people. View quote
Robert Morgan
I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery. View quote
Robert Morgan
Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle. View quote
Robert Morgan
Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners. View quote
Robert Morgan
With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed. View quote
Robert Morgan
The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged. View quote
Robert Morgan
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience. View quote
Robert Morgan
Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet. View quote
Robert Morgan
A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising. (Robert Morgan)
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does. View quote
Robert Morgan
The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times. View quote
Robert Morgan
When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture. View quote
Robert Morgan
In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out. View quote
Robert Morgan
One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime. View quote
Robert Morgan
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English. View quote
Robert Morgan
Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there. View quote
Robert Morgan
I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think. View quote
Robert Morgan
I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do. View quote
Robert Morgan
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation. (Robert Morgan)
In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking. View quote
Robert Morgan
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end. View quote
Robert Morgan
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems. View quote
Robert Morgan
Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that. View quote
Robert Morgan

Robert Morgan

Occupation: American Poet
Born: October 3, 1944
Quotes count: 56